This book tells the story of Holocaust survivor and prominent banker Marcel Goldman, born in Krakow in 1926. Goldman started his studies in economics in Krakow and completed them in Israel, where he became a respected banker. In telling his story, this book analyzes Israel's social and economic development, its causes and circumstances. Following Goldman as our main character, we take a close look at the birth of the private banking sector and the building of modern economy in Israel. The book also describes the life of Polish Jews in Israel in general, the way in which they settled there, and built the prosperity of the state. The story of Marcel Goldman is an example of how Israel's success is the sum of its citizens' successes.

This book constitutes a journey into the obscure field of sectarian-guided discourses of radical Islamist groups. It provides new insights into the ideological mechanisms utilized by such organizations to incite sectarian conflicts and recruit local and foreign guardians to their alleged cause. This book examines diverse aspects and dimensions of the discourses of Sunni-based ISIS and Shia-based al-Hashd al-Shaabi and explores manipulative and ideological discursive strategies utilized by media outlets associated with these groups. It delves into linguistic and contextual activities, implicit and explicit messages within the discourses of various media outlets operating in the heart of the Middle East. It also scrutinizes and explains aspects of politicization, religionization and sectarianization within the media discourse of terrorist groups in the digital era.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book provides the first overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. Written by leading international experts, chapters cover every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval period to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Uzbek, and Urdu, its depth of coverage is unrivalled in providing a developmental picture of Afghanistan's Islam, including such issues as the rise of Sufism, women's religiosity, state religious policies, and transnational Islamism. Looking beyond the unifying rhetoric of theology, the book reveals the disparate and contested forms of Afghanistan's Islam.

Muslims in the Western Imagination explores the ways in which Muslim men are depicted as monsters throughout history. Monsters help a society delineate who belongs in a social group and who, or what, is excluded. Even when Muslim monsters are symbolic, as in post-9/11 zombie films, they still function to define Muslims as non-human entities. These are not portrayals of Muslim men as malevolent human characters, but rather as creatures that occupy the imagination-non-humans that exhibit their wickedness outwardly on the skin. They populate medieval tales, Renaissance paintings, Shakespearean dramas, Gothic horror novels, and Hollywood films. Through an exhaustive survey of medieval, early modern, and contemporary literature, art, and cinema, Sophia Rose Arjana examines the dehumanizing ways in which Muslim men have been constructed and represented as monsters, and the impact such representations have on perceptions of Muslims. The study is the first to present a Foucauldian genealogy of these creatures, from the demons and giants of the Middle Ages to the hunchbacks with filed teeth that appeared in the 2006 film 300. The book argues that constructions of Muslim monsters constitute a recurring theme, first formulated in medieval Christian anti-Semitism. Arjana shows how Muslim monsters are often related to Jewish monsters, and more broadly to Christian anti-Semitism, which involves both religious bigotry and fears surrounding bodily differences. Like the Jewish monster, the Muslim monster is not simply a product of religious bigotry, but of anxiety surrounding bodily difference. Overall, Arjana argues persuasively, these dehumanizing constructions deeply embedded in Western consciousness are internalized beliefs and practices that contribute to the culture of violence-both rhetorical and bodily- against Muslims.

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, religious fundamentalism has dominated public debate as never before. Policymakers, educators and the general public all want to know: Why do fundamentalist movements turn violent? Are fundamentalisms a global threat to human rights, security and democratic forms of government? What is the future of fundamentalism? To answer questions like these, "Strong Religion" draws on the results of the Fundamentalism Project, a decade-long interdisciplinary study of antimodernist, antisecular militant religious movements on five continents and within seven religious traditions. The authors of this study analyze the various social structures, cultural contexts and political environments in which fundamentalist movements have emerged around the world, from the Islamic Hamas and Hizbullah to the Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries of Northern Ireland, and from the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition of the United states to the Sikh radicals and Hindu nationalists of India. Offering a vividly detailed portrait of the cultures that nourish such movements, "Strong Religion" describes different modes of fundamentalism and identifies the kinds of historical events that can trigger them. For anyone who wants to understand why fundamentalist movements arise and what makes them turn violent, "Strong Religion" should be essential reading.

This enlightening edited collection shows how migration shapes the lives of faith communities - and vice versa - through diverse prisms including diaspora, generational change, cultural conflict, conceptions of 'ministry' and artistic response. The contributors comprise writers, poets and artists from the three largest Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and beyond. They show how issues of migration are addressed through a variety of different media such as theological debate and shared community action, poetry and art. As issues of migration are an important factor in so many political and social debates, faith communities are looking for guidance on how to deepen their theological understanding of migration. This book helps them to reflect on their own practices and experiences, learn from their own traditions and engage in dialogue with diverse communities. *All royalties from book sales will be donated to The Helen Bamber Foundation - a UK-based charity that supports people who have survived extreme physical, sexual and psychological violence.*

Grounded in nine years of ethnographic research on the al Muhajiroun/Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah movement (ALM/ASWJ), Douglas Weeks mixes ethnography and traditional research methods to tell the complete story of al Muhajiroun. Beginning with three core events that became a primer for radical Islamic political thought in the UK, Al Muhajiroun, A Case Study in Islamic Activism traces the development of the movement form its incipient beginnings to its current status. Based on his extensive interaction with the group and its leaders, Weeks contextualizes the history, beliefs, methods, and differences between ALM/ASWJ, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State so that the group and the threat it poses is comprehensively understood.

This book theorizes a philosophical framework for educational policy and practice in the southern Philippines where decades of religious and political conflict between a minority Muslim community and the Philippine state has plagued the educational and economic development of the region. It offers a critical historical and ethnographic analysis of a century of failed attempts under successive U.S. colonial and independent Philippine governments to deploy education as a tool to mitigate the conflict and assimilate the Muslim minority into the mainstream of Philippine society and examines recent efforts to integrate state and Islamic education before proposing a philosophy of prophetic pragmatism as a more promising framework for educational policy and practice that respects the religious identity and fosters the educational development of Muslim Filipinos. It represents a timely contribution to the search for educational policies and practices more responsive to the needs and religious identities of Muslim communities emerging from conflict, not only in the southern Philippines, but in other international contexts as well.

This book analyzes the systematic construction of the image of the Other (that is, non-Muslims) by two radical Islamic Groups, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia and Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia. The author documents discourse patterns in the groups' publications and speeches stereotyping non-Muslims as hostile towards Islam and imagining Islam's imminent victory after an inevitable clash with all other civilizations. Although these groups do not engage in physical violence, the author categorizes their efforts to stereotype non-Muslims as "symbolic violence" and counterproductive because of the religious and ethnic pluralism of Indonesian society. Muhammad Iqbal Ahnaf is a lecturer and researcher at the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University and at Darul Ulum Islamic University, Lamongan, Indonesia.

Jihadist movements have claimed that they are merely vehicles for the application of God's word, distancing themselves from politics, which they call dirty and manmade. Yet on closer examination, jihadist movements are immersed in politics, negotiating political relationships not just with the forces surrounding them, but also within their own ranks. Drawing on case studies from North Africa and the Sahel - including Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania - this study examines jihadist movements from the inside, uncovering their activities and internal struggles over the past three decades. Highlighting the calculations that jihadist field commanders and clerics make, Alexander Thurston shows how leaders improvise, both politically and religiously, as they adjust to fast-moving conflicts. Featuring critical analysis of Arabic-language jihadist statements, this book offers unique insights into the inner workings of jihadist organisations and sheds new light on the phenomenon of mass-based jihadist movements and proto-states.

Jihadist movements have claimed that they are merely vehicles for the application of God's word, distancing themselves from politics, which they call dirty and manmade. Yet on closer examination, jihadist movements are immersed in politics, negotiating political relationships not just with the forces surrounding them, but also within their own ranks. Drawing on case studies from North Africa and the Sahel - including Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania - this study examines jihadist movements from the inside, uncovering their activities and internal struggles over the past three decades. Highlighting the calculations that jihadist field commanders and clerics make, Alexander Thurston shows how leaders improvise, both politically and religiously, as they adjust to fast-moving conflicts. Featuring critical analysis of Arabic-language jihadist statements, this book offers unique insights into the inner workings of jihadist organisations and sheds new light on the phenomenon of mass-based jihadist movements and proto-states.

If you truly love Allah, you will die for him.

Your death will mean much reward for you and your family in heaven.

Only death will prove your love.

It was the final test. A chance to win not only the love of Allah, but the love of her father--something she had never been able to earn. Esther took a deep breath and raised her hand in the air. At the age of eighteen, she had just volunteered to become a suicide bomber.

Defying Jihad is the true story of a girl growing up under radical Islamic rule, trained to believe her ultimate purpose was to serve Allah by dying as a jihadist. But two nights before she was to leave forever, she had a dream . . . one that would change the course of her destiny.

Against all odds, Esther became a follower of Jesus--even though leaving Islam meant her death sentence. But rather than kill her immediately, Esther's furious father challenged her to a series of public debates with Muslim scholars: the Bible versus the Quran. If Esther won, she might yet survive. But if the Muslim clerics won, Esther must renounce her Christian faith. For an entire month--if she lived that long--Esther would be brought before the mob daily to defend her newfound faith. Would God give her the words to argue against Muslim leaders, former friends, and even her own family?

Defying Jihad is an amazing story of a woman prepared to surrender all for Jesus--and whose life transformed from terror to overwhelming love.

A perennial frontier for Islamic orthodoxy, Bangladesh is witnessing an alarming rise in Islamist-inspired assassinations and terrorist attacks. In July 2016, the world's attention fell upon a cafe in a leafy Dhaka neighbourhood as the barbarity of a distant 'Caliphate' was visited on this corner of South Asia. Twenty-nine died in the assault on the Holey Bakery, affixing an unbidden nightmare to the image of a supposedly tolerant Muslim nation. Joseph Allchin probes Bangladesh's recent and distant past as he investigates how it has become the latest front in world extremism. Delving into the local and global differences between political actors, he exposes the continued influence of the country's independence struggle on today's allegiances, and scrutinises the careers of two long-term rivals: current prime minister Sheikh Hasina, and Khaleda Zia, who held the office in 1991-6 and 2001-6. This unerring investigation examines the relationship between radical Islam and the Bangladeshi political class, laying bare the extremist forces that bedevil the country's present and future.

When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they announced the overthrow of a world scarred by exploitation and domination. In the very moment of revolution, these sentiments were put to the test as antisemitic pogroms swept the former Pale of Settlement. The pogroms posed fundamental questions of the Bolshevik project, revealing the depth of antisemitism within sections of the working class, peasantry and Red Army. Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution offers the first book-length analysis of the Bolshevik response to antisemitism. Contrary to existing understandings, it reveals this campaign to have been led not by the Party leadership, as is often assumed, but by a loosely connected group of radicals who mobilized around a Jewish political subjectivity. By examining pogroms committed by the Red Army, Brendan McGeever also uncovers the explosive overlap between revolutionary politics and antisemitism, and the capacity for class to become racialized in a moment of crisis.

In the spring of 1575, Holland's Northern Quarter--the waterlogged peninsula stretching from Amsterdam to the North Sea--was threatened with imminent invasion by the Spanish army. Since the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt a few years earlier, the Spanish had repeatedly failed to expel the rebels under William of Orange from this remote region, and now there were rumors that the war-weary population harbored traitors conspiring to help the Spanish invade. In response, rebel leaders arrested a number of vagrants and peasants, put them on the rack, and brutally tortured them until they confessed and named their principals--a witch-hunt that eventually led to a young Catholic lawyer named Jan Jeroenszoon.

"Treason in the Northern Quarter" tells how Jan Jeroenszoon, through great personal courage and faith in the rule of law, managed to survive gruesome torture and vindicate himself by successfully arguing at trial that the authorities remained subject to the law even in times of war. Henk van Nierop uses Jan Jeroenszoon's exceptional story to give the first account of the Dutch Revolt from the point of view of its ordinary victims--town burghers, fugitive Catholic clergy, peasants, and vagabonds. For them the Dutch Revolt was not a heroic struggle for national liberation but an ordinary dirty war, something to be survived, not won.

An enthralling account of an unsuspected story with surprising modern resonance, "Treason in the Northern Quarter" presents a new image of the Dutch Revolt, one that will fascinate anyone interested in the nature of revolution and civil war or the fate of law during wartime.

The militant Islam represented by Al-Qaeda is often described as a global movement. Apart from the geographical range of its operations and support, little else is held to define it as 'global'.Landscapes of the Jihad explores the features that Al-Qaeda and other strands of militant Islam share in common with global movements. These include a decentralised organisation and an emphasis on ethical rather than properly political action.Devji brings these and other characteristics of Al-Qaeda together in an analysis of the jihad that locates it squarely within the transformationof political thought after the Cold War. The jihad emerges from the breakdown of traditional as well as modern forms of authority in the Muslim world. It is neither dogmatic in an old-fashioned way nor ideological in the modern sense, and concernedneither with correct doctrinal practice in the present nor with some revolutionary utopia of the future. Instead it is fragmented, dispersed and highly individualistic.

Professor Roberts examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context. She focuses on the experience of Algerian Jews and their evolving identity as citizens as they competed with the other populations in the colony, including newly naturalised non-French settlers and Algerian Muslims, for control over the scarce resources of the colonial state. The author argues that this resulted in antisemitic violence and hotly contested debates over the nature of French identity and rights of citizenship. Tracing the ambiguities and tensions that Algerian Jews faced, the book shows that antisemitism was not coherent or stable but changed in response to influences within Algeria, and from metropolitan France, Europe and the Middle East. Written for a wide audience, this title contributes to several fields including Jewish history, colonial and empire studies, antisemitism within municipal politics, and citizenship, and adds to current debates on transnationalism and globalization.

In Resilient Communities, Jana Krause focuses on civilian agency and mobilization 'from below' and explains violence and non-violence in communal wars. Drawing on extensive field research on ethno-religious conflicts in Ambon/Maluku Province in eastern Indonesia and Jos/Plateau State in central Nigeria, this book shows how civilians responded to local conflict dynamics very differently, evading, supporting, or collectively resisting armed groups. Combining evidence collected from more than 200 interviews with residents, community leaders, and former fighters, local scholarly work (in Indonesian), and local newspaper-based event data analysis, this book explains civilian mobilization, militia formation, and conflict escalation. The book's comparison of vulnerable mixed communities and (un)successful prevention efforts demonstrates how under courageous leadership resilient communities can emerge that adapt to changing conflict zones and collectively prevent killings. By developing the concepts of communal war and social resilience, Krause extends our understanding of local violence, (non-)escalation, and implications for prevention.

Jihadist narratives have evolved dramatically over the past five years, driven by momentous events in the Middle East and beyond; the death of bin Laden; the rise and ultimate failure of the Arab Spring; and most notably, the rise of the so-called Islamic State.For many years, al-Qaeda pointed to an aspirational future Caliphate as their utopian end goal - one which allowed them to justify their violent excesses in the here and now. Islamic State turned that aspiration into a dystopic reality, and in the process hijacked the jihadist narrative, breathing new life into the global Salafi-Jihadi movement. Despite air-strikes from above, and local disillusionment from below, the new caliphate has stubbornly persisted and has been at the heart of ISIS's growing global appeal.This timely collection of essays examines how jihadist narratives have changed globally, adapting to these turbulent circumstances. Area and thematic specialists consider transitions inside the Middle East and North Africa as well as in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. As these analyses demonstrate, the success of the ISIS narrative has been as much about resonance with local contexts, as it has been about the appeal of the global idea of a tangible and realised caliphate.

The Muslim Brotherhood in the West remains a mysterious entity. In The Closed Circle, Lorenzo Vidino offers an unprecedented inside view into how one of the world's most influential Islamist groups operates. He marshals unique interviews with prominent former members and associates from Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America, shedding light on why and how people join and leave Western outfits of the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing on these striking personal accounts, Vidino weaves together the experiences of individuals who participated in and later renounced Brotherhood groups. Their perspectives provide a wealth of new information about the Brotherhood's secretive inner workings and the networks that connecting the small yet highly organized cluster of Brotherhood-influenced groups. The Closed Circle examines the tactics the Brotherhood uses to recruit and retain participants as well as how and why individuals make the difficult decision to leave. Through the stories of diverse former members, Vidino paints a portrait of a highly structured, tight-knit movement. His unprecedented access and understanding of the group's activities and motivations has significant policy implications concerning Western Brotherhood organizations and also illuminates the underlying mechanisms found in a range of extremist groups.

The Dialectics of the Religious and the Secular: Studies on the Future of Religion contains the work of 15 international scholars who have wrestled with the question of the relevancy, meaning and future of religion within the context of the increasing antagonisms between the religious and secular realms of modern civil society and its globalisation. Each author indicates the possibility of mitigating or preventing the continuation of this antagonism by historically moving toward a more reconciled and humane future global society.

In popular culture and scholarship, a consistent trope about Mormonism is that it features a propensity for violence, born of the religion's theocratic impulses and the antinomian tendencies of special revelation. Mormonism and Violence critically assesses the relationship of Mormonism and violence through a close examination of Mormon history and scripture, focusing on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Element pays special attention to violence in the Book of Mormon and the history of the movement, from the 1830s to the present.